District 65/202 and ISBE Datasets

FOIAGRAS is a free newsletter run by Tom Hayden (FOIA GRAS LLC) that explores various topics in local Evanston (and now North Suburban Chicago) Governance. I publish and share all my data and reports. Subscribing is free, so please subscribe or share. Email (tom@foiagras.com) or comment with issues or mistakes.

Subscribe now

The first dataset I make available is a digitized version of all Illinois School Districts (excluding CPS) Annual Statement of Affairs Vendors (view file). This contains a list of any vendor who did any work with any District in Illinois. It’s useful if you want to search for a specific vendor and see if they worked for other Districts.1

Digitizing this file was quite difficult, I had to download around 800 different statements from the ISBE and hired someone to write an Excel Macro to export the data required here. If you find any issues, please let me know.

On this spreadsheet, there are also tabs for District 65 and ETHS (District 202). These reflect all payments made to vendors from either District in SY20232. For instance, you can find in SY2023, District 65 spent $29,186.74 with the Grecian Kitchen.

Data for This Year

Since the prior dataset only goes through July 2023, you can view everything up to the present for District 65 in this datasheet, which is the digitized “List of Bills” from board meetings. This dataset contains two tabs, one for all the bills paid and another tab for the totals by vendor. This is where you can find the potentially newsworthy items. For instance;

• District 65 has paid the architects Cordogan-Clark $6,570,396.83 in the period July 2023 - Feb 2024.

• Grecian Kitchen expenses have been $8,393.65 since July 2023.

• In January 2024, District 65 paid $30,000 to “SHERYL RING WEIKAL CLIENT TRUST ACCOUNT” which appears to be some kind of legal settlement. Noteable is that Ms. Weikal is the lawyer who represented District 65 Assistant Principal Ms. Sebaggala in her case against a District 219 parent, which was dismissed, resulting in Ms. Sebaggala owing legal fees. I’ll be FOIA’ing a copy of this settlement agreement. (Update: this is a payment unrelated to the D219 case)

If you find any issues or anything interesting in the data, please let me know: tom@foiagras.com

Donate to Me